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Technology GAMERS have been designing and controlling their own fictional cities ever since games like Populous and SimCity appeared in the late 1980s. Now software that works along similar lines could allow town planners to test the likely impact of their decisions on the UK population. Developed by geographers at the University of Leeds, the simulator uses anonymised data from the 2001 census to model the attributes and behaviours of over 25 million households, analysing multiple scenarios to predict urban planning effects. “It works through hundreds of variables and projects the effect of policy change 10 to 20 years into the future,” says developer Mark Birkin. “We’re just doing for real what SimCity players have been doing for years in a computer gaming environment.” SPRAYING chicken carcasses with viruses may sound crazy – but if the viruses are harmless to humans but lethal to food poisoning bacteria, it could be a way of making food safer. “In theory, these sprays could be used to wash any carcass in any abattoir,” says Paul Barrow of the University of Nottingham, UK, who heads Supasalvac, the 21 per cent of UK citizens would agree to a new nuclear power station being built within 100 kilometres of their home To people living on the north-east coast of England, it’s just one of many rotting shipwrecks. To Americans, the long-lost hulk of the 18th-century warship Bonhomme Richard is a talisman of their country’s struggle for independence. Now, thanks to some smart software, this relic of the fledgling US may finally be found. In September 1779 John Paul Jones, founder of America’s nascent Continental Navy, captained the 42-gun Bonhomme Richard in an attack on the British warship HMS Serapis off the Yorkshire coast. The American vessel was fatally damaged and later sank – but not before Jones and his crew had boarded the Serapis and captured it. “That victory convinced France to lend America more resources to fight the revolutionary war, so the Bonhomme Richard is considered the holy grail of US maritime history,” says Melissa Ryan of the Ocean Technology Foundation (OTF), a non-profit marine exploration body. To locate the wreck, Applied Science Associates (ASA) of Rhode Island decided to merge two of its software packages: one that tracks oil spills shifted by currents under the water’s surface, and another that works out where crippled ships may have drifted in winds and tides. At the time, eyewitnesses to the sinking left clues on weather, currents and tides, says Lee Dooley of ASA. When fed into the merged tracker, the data threw up a number of possible locations for the wreck. In August this year an OTF sonar team found five wrecks in the suggested areas that will be examined by divers next summer. “And there’s one they feel really good about,” says Dooley. Systems to prevent runway collisions Ridding fuel tanks of flammable vapours Fresh research into aircraft icing threats Independently powered video-capable flight recorders HOMING IN ON A NAVAL LEGEND European consortium developing the technology. Supasalvac’s sprays contain a type of phage – a virus that only infects and kills certain strains of bacteria. After testing a prototype spray on 300 chicken carcasses, Barrow’s team managed to reduce salmonella contamination by a thousandfold compared to the traditional treatment, washing with water alone. Phage cocktails could now be developed to tackle several food bugs at once, Barrow says. The Israeli military is developing a hornet-sized robotic “insect” that can undertake reconnaissance missions, the country’s Vice Premier Shimon Peres told a Tel Aviv newspaper last week. Peres says the drone will be able to video hard-to-reach rocket launching sites in Lebanon and Palestine and reveal their positions. If it works, it will probably be the first military invention that can be defeated by flypaper. A radio that erases the DJ’s chatter when you record music off the air is being developed by Hitachi. It’s simple to do, says the firm, because while speech is broadcast at the same level in both left and right channels, the levels in music are spread unequally between the stereo channels. So the new radio will scan through the recording and zap any audio that shows no left-right imbalance. GIZMO Cryptologist Jean-Pierre Seifert says measures taken to speed up modern microprocessors, by allowing them to predict which instructions they will need next, leave cryptographic keys open to hackers. In one attempt, he gleaned a 512-bit key using a simple piece of spyware (Le Monde, Paris, 18 November) “Security has been sacrificed for the benefit of performance” –Relic of the American revolution?– OCEAN TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION www.newscientist.com 25 November 2006 | NewScientist | 25 FINANCIAL TIMES/HARRIS INTERACTIVE AVIATION’S MOST WANTED... The US air safety watchdog says the measures that would most improve aviation safety are: SOURCE: US NTSB Sims put real cities to the test Biospray fights food poisoning
